First StepsOkay, I think it‘s time for a post about the first steps on your journey to becoming a gambling affiliate. I recently posted about
how to create a website and I suggest you read that post if you are completely new to creating websites etc.
So, let‘s not waste any more time and get straight to it. 5 steps to go!
1st Step – Choose a Niche for your affiliate business/websiteAs an upcoming affiliate, the very first step should be finding a good niche in the gambling market. By finding a niche you will have an easier time getting traffic and making money. Example: Competing for (generic/huge) terms such as „Online Casino“ will be way harder than „High roller Casino“. You need to find a niche that makes up just a small part of the gambling world.
If you target a niche and build a top notch quality website around it, you will receive more traffic to your website (comparably) and that traffic can be converted to real money players. Targeted traffic is way easier to convert even if the pure amount of traffic is less. Don‘t try to compete with the big gambling affiliates right away, the competition is extremely hard and making money will be tough.
Do your research, online gambling is so complex, you will surely find a part that is promising affiliate wise as well as of personal interest to you. Ideally you need to find a niche with relatively little competition and lots of search engine traffic. I will create a more detailed post on finding a gambling niche later and link it here.
2nd Step – The Domain NameAs easy as it may sound, choosing a domain name can be hard – it‘s the name of your site and it needs to be attractive as well as fitting your niche. Back in the day, internet marketers focused on getting their desired keywords into their domain name but to be honest, things have changed by now and this is no longer „essential“ - yeah, it won‘t hurt of course if you can come up with a domain name that not only sounds/reads nice but also contains your main keyword but with Google‘s recent updates, Branding has become more and more important.
I personally prefer domain names that are as short as possible as well as catchy – it‘s a dream come true obviously if you can find a domain name that additionally contains your keywords. Fact is, no matter if your domain contains your focus keywords or not, you can still rank for any term and I will create a more detailed post on the topic of how to choose a domain name and link it here at a later point.
3rd Step – Get a nice WebdesignWell, even though I have created and run dozens of affiliate websites for many years, I have never been a (good) webdesigner at all and you know what? It doesn‘t matter at all, you don‘t need to be good at that to become a successful affiliate. Of course it won‘t hurt if you are good it but it‘s by no means essential.
Some new affiliates are making a big mistake by „wasting“ lots of time on trying to design their website on their own – in many cases in order to avoid additional costs – still, I highly recommend you don‘t do that. Your time is valuable and you should use it for productive stuff.
Many years ago, when I started out as an affiliate, there weren‘t as many options available as nowadays and I really tried to build a website from scratch all on my own. The site sucked big time and I wasted countless hours. I finally hired someone to create a great design for me, paid around 200 USD or so and it was one of the best decisions. Nowadays it‘s even easier – you have wordpress (CMS), which comes with thousands of great free themes and then there are several specific premium wordpress themes available, that specifically cater gambling affiliates – these look extremely nice and are optimized for affiliates. You know what? They don‘t cost a fortune and you can get such themes for around $50 or so… a steal really!
A post on webdesign/recommended wordpress themes for gambling affiliates will follow soon.
4th Step – Content is King, write lots of itCliché or not – Content is King and it‘s a fact and easily the most important aspect of any affiliate website. Even if you found the perfect niche, without good (and lots of) content, you won‘t ever be a successful affiliate. Just throwing up some lame content and affiliate links on your site won‘t do the trick nowadays – thanks god it won‘t! Instead, you really have to provide lots of top quality content. If you website features great content, your visitors will browse way longer through your site (google ranking factor nowadays), other webmasters as well as regular people will link back to your website and you will obviously rank for various keywords on Google → more entry points for traffic.
Some people really neglect how important quality content is – especially with gambling sites, where so many sites feature the same old stuff. You should never forget a website‘s real use case for each and every visitor: If you visit a website, you are looking for information and you as an affiliate need to make sure, that your visitors can find the exact information they are looking for and in a quality as good as possible.
My rule of thumb is that any affiliate should try to get a minimum of one article online each and every day – sounds harder than it is! Two articles of nice quality a day are even better and will help you rank better much faster. A high quality website is never „finished“ and you should keep adding new content to your website regularly even after reaching 100 pages – don‘t forget that as an affiliate, this is actually your job, it‘s the source of your income and the more traffic you get, the more money you will earn.
A post with tips on Content Creation will follow and linked here.
5th Step – Good, old Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)SEO is a huge field and every affiliate has to deal with it – after all, thousands of websites are competing with each other to get as much traffic from the search engines as possible. You will have a hard time succeeding if you don‘t care about SEO. There are some „rules“ and guidelines you need to follow, in order for your site to rank as good as possible in the search engines. The better your rankings are, the more traffic you will receive and the more money you will make.
Since SEO is such a big topic, I won‘t go into detail here. I will create a post on SEO Basics shortly and link it here. Don‘t be scared though, SEO is no rocket-science… it can be considered some sort of science indeed but anyone can follow the basics and this helps a lot on the way to becoming a successful affiliate.